Wargaming for the Social & Cognitive Sciences

Description: Wargaming has existed for centuries but is a relatively underutilized tool for those working in the social and cognitive sciences. We’ll discuss the value of wargames and tabletop exercises as tools for social scientists, including specific examples where games were used to design user interfaces, or to increase the resilience of sociotechnical systems. Discussion will also cover how wargamers and social scientists can benefit from working with each other, and should do so more frequently.

Bio: Steve Dorton is the Chief Engineer for Social & Behavioral Sciences at the MITRE Corporation, and an Adjunct Lecturer for the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. His research generally focuses on sensemaking, decision making, and artificial intelligence, where he employs wargames and tabletop exercises as means to glean contextually rich insights from decision makers in high consequence applications.

References:

Dorton, S.L., Maryeski, L.R., Ogren, L., Dykens, I.T., & Main, A. (2020). A wargame-augmented knowledge elicitation method for the agile development of novel systems. Systems, 8(27), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems8030027

Dorton, S., Tupper, S., & Maryeski, L. (2017). Going digital: Consequences of increasing resolution of a wargaming tool for knowledge elicitation. Proceedings of the 2017 International Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 61(1), 2037-2041. https://doi.org/10.1177/1541931213601988

Dorton, S.L., Barrett, E., Fersch, T., Langone, A., & Neville, K.J. (2023). RAD-XP: Tabletop exercises for eliciting resilience requirements for sociotechnical systems. Systems, 11(487). https://doi.org/10.3390/systems11100487.

Dorton, S. L., Fersch, T., Barrett, E., Langone, A., Seip, M., Bilsborough, S., Hudson, C. B., Ward, P., & Neville, K. J. (2023). The Value of Wargames and Tabletop Exercises as Naturalistic Tools. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 67(1), 2454-2459. https://doi.org/10.1177/21695067231192617

Host or Publisher Georgetown University Wargaming Society